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Hi, Broadway World. This is Francis Jue. I'm playing Doik in Lauren Yee's
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Cambodian Rock Band at Arena Stage. Hi, I'm Joe Noh and I play Chum in Cambodian Rock Band
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Hi, I'm Brooke Ishibashi and I play Niri Ansotia in Cambodian Rock Band at Arena Stage
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Hi, my name is Tim Liu. I play Ted Lang in Cadre in Cambodian Rock Band here at Arena Stage
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Cambodian Rock Band is about parents and children. It's about rock and roll
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It's about what happens when the world around you changes. Survival and what it means to go to a new place and either shed or hide trauma
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and how that affects families especially. It's equal parts family drama, history play, epic rock concert
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It is a rock show with a play together at the same time
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And I think that's part of what makes it so special. I think one of Lauren Yee's most genius choices was telling the story of Cambodian Rock Band
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through the music, through the rock and roll that was so popular in the 60s, 70s in Cambodia
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I think that you have to tell it with rock music because that was the pinnacle of when
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Cambodian culture was at its peak, its height, was this beautiful Cambodian rock music
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that combined so many elements of like French New Wave and California Surf and Afro-Cuban beats
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and they put their Cambodian spin on it. And as a culture, to see that at its height being taken away in an instant overnight
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that's sort of why we have to see it through that lens because we have to see what we lost
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I think all of us feel an immense responsibility to the Khmer community to tell their story
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to uphold the legacy of the music and the culture, a lot of which was, you know, the regime tried to erase
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There's a reason why authoritarian regimes go after artists. It's because art helps us know who we are
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Art tells us not just who we are but what we can be
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And I think that when Lauren came across this Cambodian rock and roll
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and started researching the musicians and discovered how many of them were gone
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she wanted to honor them and to tell this story because by doing the show
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by keeping the music alive, by keeping these stories alive, these artists, these Cambodians are still with us
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I think Broadway World audiences would be so excited to see a story that we've seen before with musicals like Hair
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stories like that but told in a wholly different way through a whole completely different lens
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Oh, they're in for a extremely well-written play with extremely well-written rock music
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performed extremely well. This is a play that helps us understand who we are today, not just Cambodia in the 1970s
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not just Cambodian refugees coping today. It is about all of us and the choices we're making today
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So, hope to see you there
